 I'm Marcia Joyner and this is Community Matters and today we are talking to a dear friend and you all know I only talk to dear friends and Kim Coco Iwamoto and we're going to talk about what is currently on the ballot. Some of you have gotten your ballots today and others will walk in on Tuesday, the first Tuesday in November. However, there are two constitutional amendments. Well, one constitutional amendment but there are two issues that deal with the constitution of the state of Hawaii. The state of Hawaii has a constitution just like the United States has a constitution. The counties have charters but those are the things that govern how the state operates. They are the things. So we have asked Kim who is an attorney and she served on the Civil Rights Commission and the Board of Education and more things than I can count. So we have asked him to clarify what is this thing that we keep hearing the ads say con amp. So what is a con amp? So I believe the ads are referring to the constitutional amendment that's being proposed that would be available to the voters of Hawaii to participate in that question and that result. So the question is generally about do we want to amend the current constitution to include a provision that says, and the question is framed like this, shall the legislature be authorized to establish as provided by law a surcharge on investment real property to be used to support public education? So that's how it is worded. That's correct. Now if it passes and I can't say whether it will or it won't, who knows. But what happens then? Let's assume that it passes. Then what happens? So to even get this question put on the ballot, it had to go through the legislature and the legislators had to agree on the language, like what they wanted to include, what they wanted to put up to the people to vote on. And then the governor, the governor, I signed off on it and so here's on our ballot. Eventually what happens, the term as provided by law means that the legislature will get an opportunity to flesh out the constitution. So generally constitutional language in general is much broader than statutory language. So the constitution says this agency has this right or this person has this right, whether it's a right to be free and a right to be treated equally, for instance. That's a very general right. And then oftentimes the legislature that comes in with some of the details or the state agencies. And then under the constitution, then we have the legislature, the statutes. And then underneath that is Hawaii administrative rules, which have the force and effect of law. And that's all the nitty gritty of lawmaking. That's like, for instance, how long somebody has, how many days somebody has to appeal a decision made by, let's say the tax branch or something. So all like when, how much a fine might be. So there's a lot of details put into Hawaii administrative rules that actually explain how the agency of the state is going to interpret the statute. And the statutes often are defined in terms, there are limitations to the constitution. So they must fit within the parameters of the constitution. So having a broad, broadly framed constitutional amendment is actually not surprising. It's actually very typical. So how will we know, how do we guarantee that this, what happens here, will actually support the schools and the teachers? And how do we know that? Yes, because it says it here. It says it in the language. It shall be used to support public education. So there's two details here. So currently our state constitution says that, yes, the state may charge taxes or surcharges, but only currently the constitution says only the counties may tax real property. So the question is, so in Hawaii's unique compared to the rest of the nation, we are the only educational jurisdiction that does not currently rely on real property. So in every other educational jurisdiction across the nation, they rely on land owners to pay for public education. So we are the only ones. And so when the constitution of Hawaii was drafted, I don't know how many of your viewers remember the Big Five, the industry, they were the biggest landowners in the state and they had a lot of influence on the original drafting of the state constitution. They wanted to make sure, right, because if you're taxing landowners to pay for public education, they were like, no, we don't want to pay for the public education of our workers. Let them pay for it out of their income tax or the general excise tax. So it was really about this kind of, in some ways, we call them Republicans. I mean, this idea of don't tax the rich, tax the people using the services, right, that's a very philosophical mindset. So it's very strange to me that a lot of the governors, former governors of Hawaii have come out against this because it's like, why would you not want to tax landowners to pay for these services? So anyway, so the current constitution says only the counties shall tax real property. So in order to be able to raise revenue from real property taxes, we need to change the constitution. There's no way you can do that. So that's the first step. So allowing the legislature to tax real property. And here's an interesting thing. The way the question is rewarded, it says investment property. Investment property is very different than a property that you live in, right? That's a residential property. That's where you live. In fact, we even have exemptions when we have property taxes. If you live in your home and you own it, you're allowed a personal exemption. So that would be not an investment property. So it's very clear in the question that it pertains limits only to investment property. The second limitation that the legislature put on this question is that it supports public education so that means that it's that money that's raised that only goes to public education. So that would take care of not just the teachers, but the deferred maintenance because I keep coming back to that one. Right. Yeah. As of 2015, the deferred maintenance and infrastructure backlog for the Department of Education was $3.5 billion. I mean, so it's really, we've been we've been neglecting public education for decades, for decades. And so this question is really an opportunity, it's a referendum on our lawmakers and our past governors that they've all been neglecting public education and the people are not accepting it anymore. So this is really opportunity to rise up and revolt against the current status quo that doesn't want to pay for this government service. But is that true in all government services? Because we are lacking in lots of government services. Oh, absolutely. And the reason why that is is because of for some reason, you know, even though we are run by Democrats in Hawaii, I mean, we're there and like everyone's like most people, most lawmakers are Democrats. In fact, it's hard to get elected as a Republican. But we have some of them. Democratic 10 is so large that we've allowed so many Republican values to infiltrate the Democratic Party. So now we have these Democrats who are really carrying the propaganda of the Republican Party. I mean, it's kind of amazing this whole idea of let's not tax landowners, let's not raise corporate taxes. Hawaii pays one of the has charges one of the lowest corporate tax rates in the nation. I heard from somebody who works for the government, the state who told me only $76 million of our entire revenue for the state is raised from corporate taxes. That's ridiculous. That's ridiculous because no companies are doing so well here. Look at all the huge corporate hotels here. They make they make millions of not billions of dollars and look at Costco where the highest growth in the nation, right? And Sam's Club, people corporations are making tons of money they can afford to pay higher tax more they can afford to be their fair share of taxes if the state just gave them the tax bill. And instead, you know what we do? We actually the state legislature continues to give real estate investors tax credits. Even these investors who live in other states, we're giving them tax credits and tax deductions. Why? We've been trying we've been trying to revoke that that statute that gives them this. At one point, they want to bring more investors into Hawaii. So they kind of use this carrot as an opportunity to bring in investment money. And now Hawaii is doing so well. We don't need to give them we need to be collecting taxes to pay for services, not giving them tax deductions and tax credits. There's so many industries people living leaving here. That's right. So if these big corporations are coming in, what what are they doing to keep our young people here? Well, and that's a whole cost of living analysis that but that actually raises a good point because some of the people who oppose this and I'm going to say con am if you don't mind because it's shorter than constitutional amendment. Once we understand what it is, when I say con am, I'm actually referring to the constitutional amendment. So some of the opponents to the constitutional amendment has said it's going to increase the cost of living or might increase rents for renters, which is a total fallacy. So Marcia, I'm not sure if you know this about me, but I actually am a real estate investor. I have an apartment building in the urban core near Alamona shopping center Walmart that area. And I've had it since 2004. So I have a lot of experience as a landlord investor. I can tell you right now, I don't I've never charged my rental rates based on my tax bill. That's completely ridiculous. I go on to Craigslist and I find out how much an equal like a one bedroom, for instance, in my area goes for, right, includes a parking as one bathroom. So I look for a comparison and that's how I decide what my rate is that I'm going to put out there. And if I deviate too much, if I get too greedy and I make it too high, then my apartment might stay vacant for 30 days or maybe 60 days. But if I price it really low, I might be able to get somebody in there in 24 hours. So it's up to me. So these are part of the market factors. It's never based on my tax bill. So that's one thing that people need to remember. What affects your rental rates going up, its supply and demand, right? So what happened during the, and there were times when my apartments would be empty for months, because there was a surplus of apartments, and frankly, not as many tenants out there in the market. But once the tenant, the demand goes up, like more tenants needing rentals and the supply goes up. So it's no with Airbnb and all of these short-term rental online rental sites that actually pulled housing out of the long-term market and put it into the short-term market. So there's no, there's much fewer apartments being rented to local families. So that means the supply goes down. So the demand stays the same, the supply goes down. And actually after the real estate bubble, the demand went up because people entered the rental market who were previously homeowners. So anyway, what's happened is rental rates have skyrocketed because of that. Again, nothing to do with the tax rate. We need to take a break and we'll be back in 60 seconds. And then we are going to delve into some more pieces of this constitutional amendment and all that it means or can mean. Okay, we'll be right back. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. I just walked by and I said, what's happening, guys? They told me they were making music. That's you. I want to know. Will you watch my show? I hope you do. It's on Tuesdays at one o'clock and it's out of the comfort zone and I'll be your host, RB Kelly. See you there. Hello, and we're back. Hi, Marcia. And today we are talking to my new best friend, Kim Coco Iwamoto. You know, Kim, I think that we sort of take it for granted that everybody knows who you are because you've been such a public figure. But tell us about Kim. Okay, well, I mean, can I speak about myself in terms of my education advocacy? Anything you would like, especially. So that's what the topic is. It's on the constitutional amendment to fund public education. So I spoke about myself as a real estate investor, right? So that's one of the roads leading to this issue. The other aspect is myself as a public education advocate. So I started in public education on the Department of Education, had a program called the Safe Schools Community Advisory Committee, and I joined that in 2004. And then it concluded in 2011. So I was on that for seven years. But in the meantime, I also ran and served on the Board of Education from 2006 until 2011. And while I was on the Board of Education, I also served on the Hawaii State Board of on the Teacher Standards Board, which certifies our teacher public school teachers to make sure that they're qualified, that the pedagogy background, the subject matter background that they're teaching. And, and I've also worked on the career technical education coordinating advisory council as a chair of that for the University of Hawaii. And that covers the, the Hara Perkins money that we get from the feds to make sure that our school, our public school and college alignment for career kinds of jobs are, are there, the structures in place. So I've more than 10,000 hours invested in public education and making sure we're doing things right in Hawaii. And I want to share with you after all of that time and all of those years, my biggest, clearest takeaway is that we have grossly and adequately funded public education in Hawaii. I mean, it's really astounding. I think I might have mentioned earlier that we have $3.5 billion or at least we did in 2015, $3.5 billion in repair maintenance and infrastructure like new buildings. That's a backlog. And we, we have the worst teacher shortage right now. And we saw it coming down the pike. We knew teachers certified teachers were going to be retiring. We just know they're aging out. So we knew we're going to have a shortage and working with the colleges of education, we know how many people are coming in. So we knew there'd be a shortage. So what's been happening is like, I think right now the current figure is one out of every three teachers teaching the DOE might not be certified or qualified to teach. And in fact, I knew, I knew back when I was on the board of education, I knew that there were Wainae and I think Nanakuli high schools, one out of every two students taking math or science, we're taking math or science from a teacher who was not qualified to teach math or science. The, me that had the pedagogy of the subject matter to teach it. So basically these kids are learning math or science from a teacher who may hate math or science. And then we turn around and we blame the students on why they might be testing a knot as well as the other. Cause Mililani, for instance, because more teachers want to teach there, they had a hundred percent of the students were taking math or science from teachers who were qualified in math and science. One of the reasons why we have such few qualified teachers in the DOE is because we're not willing to pay them. We pay, given our cost of living, the lowest salaries in the nation. Well, now, years ago, many, many years ago, they used to, the state provided housing for teachers and Nanakuli. And Wainae, in order to get them to go out there, they provided. And I understand the cottages were lovely. Right. Is there a way to do that again? You know, again, you can't just, you have to build these structures. No, I'm saying, but the idea. And so that's why I meant to explain that the root of every challenge that I've not seen across the board with public education can all be reduced to funding. Yes. But funding. Funding affects leadership because why would you want to be a principal? So you're a visionary principal. What's happening is people aren't stepping up to run a school because you're running a school that may have a lot of unqualified teachers. And there's no teacher waiting behind these people. So even if you want to get rid of like a junk teacher, for instance, there may be, you know, one or two of them. Who's going to take their place? You just don't have people willing to teach because the pay is so low. I've met teachers who've been a science teacher for the GOE who then went into nursing because it paid much more. She can make $90,000. And the social status, she's not beaten up by the media every day, are people bashing our public school system. Right. She gets to have this certain level of dignity when she's working. She gets to seen as a nurse. So what do we as ordinary citizens, what do we have to do? Now, granted, we've got this constitutional amendment. And let's assume it passes. How can we now go before the legislature and guarantee that they will spend it, that they will do what we expect, what we think we're getting? Well, the first step, right, is voting for it. And I don't think we can assume that it's going to pass. But we need to tell your friend, everyone needs to vote yes on this issue and tell your friends to vote yes. In fact, if every single public school graduate and parents of public school students and every single teacher and every single spouse of a teacher voted on this yes on this constitutional amendment, it will pass. So, okay, again, back to now it goes to the legislature. What do we have to do to guarantee our representative and our state senators? That's where I'm going with that. How do we guarantee that they will do what we think? Yes. Well, it's up to us. We have to participate in our democracy. And that's always been the case. But trust me, if the voters vote for this, it sends a clear message to the legislators that we believe that public education is a priority and that they have been neglecting their responsibility. That's what this is. This question is a referendum on their negligence. Yes. I couldn't agree more. I'm just at the point where, okay, now, assume it passes. We need to watch them to stay on them. How do we know that they don't spend this money someplace else? Well, number one, so when I was on the Board of Education, we're part of, when it came to collective bargaining, as a board member, we were a part of collective bargaining along with the governor. So the collective bargaining is where the salaries are negotiated. So if we know we're paying our teachers so low that we can't get enough teachers, then we need to raise the salaries, not just the first year, but also 10 years in. We need to make sure people not only enter as a teacher, but they stay as a teacher because every year they're getting better and better as teachers, right? And for me, I think the teacher should be at the top of the pay scale and not at the bottom because they affect every student that is moving in. Every one of us had a teacher that affected us. And why they are not looked at as the heroes. And especially here, I was reading to a class in Kalihi, this is many years ago, darling little kids, and half of them did not speak English, and they sat there very sweetly and listened. And I thought about it, I was talking to the teacher, how many of them did not speak English. And these teachers do that every day, they get new kids with all these different languages and somehow they manage. And we never, ever acknowledge them for the job they do. That's heroic. Right. And 50 years ago, Marcia, 50 years ago, two elementary school teachers could buy a home together in Hawaii. That's how much they were paid and valued. And that was just 50 years ago. That's not a long time. And today, that would, they, no, there's no way that could happen. In fact, I know teachers who have second jobs because teachers, especially if they're young teachers, they have student loans, right? And so I know teachers who were working at the Sizzler Restaurant right in the same school district. So they would be serving, they would teach the family's kids during the day and they would serve them food at night at the Sizzler Restaurant because they're working two jobs. And I'm a profound believer in one job. One full-time job should be enough. I know. So, yeah. Yeah. So that's where I'm going with this, is like, should this pass, we need, there needs to be a follow-up. We need to say, okay, we've come this far, this is the next step, that we need to guarantee that this money will be spent like we think it should be. Right. So we need to support the governor in negotiating better contracts for the teachers so that, I mean, if we know that teacher pay is keeping us from having to deal with the, to ameliorate the teacher shortage, then we need to make sure that we are offering teachers enough and enough to stay in teaching, right? So that's number one. We need to empower him or her, whoever the governor is going to be, to do that, to negotiate better contracts for teachers. I saw a piece just this morning, in fact, a gentleman that is running for the Congress from West Virginia. And he was hot because he had served in the military and came home to find hungry people, homeless people. He was, so he was teaching school. And the same things you're telling us about, but this is West Virginia. He led a strike, the teachers out on strike. And I was, I was glued to watching this to think that those are the same issues. Yeah. And we, so in Oklahoma, there's not even a teacher's union. So those teachers just on their own collectively said, let's strike, we're getting paid so poorly. Again, if you take our costs of living in Hawaii, our teachers get paid less than those Oklahoma teachers. And they have a union. And so, you know, it's very, it's so, you know, everyone thinks that the unions are, they're actually keeping teachers in the classroom. They're not, they're keeping teachers in some ways from striking unnecessarily. I mean, you know what I mean? Like at this point, are the unions keeping the teachers in the classrooms as opposed to striking? Because if it were like Oklahoma, where there was no union, the teachers just go for it. Because they're like no one's looking out for us. In West Virginia, the teachers went out and then the other unions joined them. Right. Right. Yeah. And that's, I mean, if we all, yeah, I mean, I think that's the main, the main issue. I also want to share another detail with your viewers is that currently in Hawaii, 27% of all privately held land, it's owned by investors on the main land. Right. I mean, so that's something you need to think about. Like when you think about real estate investment property, we're talking about taxing people from the main land. And when these, so when there's a piece of land in Hawaii for sale, you have local people, locally who are bidding on things, and then you have people from the main land bidding, or maybe from other countries bidding on this land. The more competition on land, on a piece of land that you have, the higher the rates go up. That's just how it is. The more crowded the market is, the more expensive that land is going to be. So when you talk about families not being able to afford Hawaii local families, it's because we're encouraging these outside investors because we charge such low real estate taxes. It's actually so cheap for them to keep the land here. Now, I want you to look in the camera over here. Yes. And I want you to tell our audience why they should vote for this amendment. Oh, well, hopefully you've been following. But mostly because it is a referendum on the neglect that public education has suffered in Hawaii for decades. We have known that this teacher shortage was coming because we've known we've been underpaying teachers. And we know that, you know, that teachers were going to be retiring. And so the cost of living is so high in Hawaii that even when we're able to recruit teachers to come to Hawaii, we can't keep them here. I want you to know that real estate rental prices will not go up because of a tax bill increase. There are much more influential factors that affect the rental rates that that renters pay more so than the property tax. I also want you to realize that when people oppose this particular constitutional amendment, that the philosophy that they're kind of adopting is one of keep landowners' profits high, keep corporations' investments high, and keep government services low. So if you subscribe to that, which I don't think a lot of Hawaii voters do, if you believe in government services, and if you recognize that public education is a service that we need to pay for, then please vote yes on this constitutional amendment. Thank you. Thank you so much. And it's a pleasure having you. Thank you, Marcia. And come back and visit with us again. Sure. Thank you. Aloha, and we'll see you next time.